Sandra Lee was dressed up as Barbra Streisand this past weekend. I don't really know what to say. Also other singers like Madonna, but that's all I could take, about 4 seconds of that. It really scared me. See?

I would really like a nice boy to buy me See's Candies, and you may parse that sentence/put the emphasis wherever you'd like.

There is this funny, buzzing crackle you hear just in one corner of my bedroom. It sounds exactly like the fizz from a carbonated beverage after you pour it, and it's making me kinda crazy because it's constant, and that sound should End. I'm not quite sure what it is.

I think it's hilarious how Bob Blumer has re-arrived at the Fud Network all re-jiggered and macho after his sensitive Surreal Chef years. Now his show intro is all...glutton for punishment! Risk-taker! Adventurer! Bourdain-manque! And now he has biceps.

Did anybody see the story of Jessica the Hippo on Animal Planet? Oh GOLLY. This couple in South Africa adopted a one-day-old orphaned hippo who has now become a 750 lb house pet who sleeps on a mattress on their porch and enjoys aromatherapy sessions. The sight of this hippo being all out-sized yet cartoonishly adorable yet enormously threatening all at once, not to mention opening doors with her hoof and clopping into the kitchen for a treat is fairly unbelievable. Just amazing.

The Kashi commercials have been driving me nuts. Yes, okay, whatever, but still. They have. One in particular uses language about how food comes from nature ready to eat, we just need to try to stay out of the way of it. Which...is true, yes, but 1) is hard to take from a company that's still doing what Nabisco does, no matter how you slice it and 2) and actually isn't *entirely* true. Nuts taste better toasted, fruit goes bad if not preserved, etc There's this kinda coy idea that in our natural state we walk along plucking green nuts and wriggling live fish for our delectation. Not...quite true. Especially if you want us to go to a grocery store to buy yer product.

Because The Sopranos is new to me: 1) Did David Straithairn's character really have a Carleton banner in his office? 2) It is amazing how Polly Bergen's voice HAS NOT CHANGED. It even freaked me out a little to hear that voice coming out of an older version of PB in a recent episode of the Sopranos, because she sounds just like the PB of yore. More power to her, and how wild. Voices really almost always age, but hers...I suppose it helped that hers always had a slighty middle-aged buzz to it, but still. Amazing!

I've been trying to drink beverages with acai berries in them but apart from their intense spendiness they are just a very intense flavor to drink! Like tutti frutti gone mad.

More things relating to coveting and the Fud Network: All of a sudden I was really jealous of Ina Garten's all-male gay army (as a friend once called it), all of these successful, sweet, solvent men who can show up with hundreds of dollars worth of rare tulips at the drop of a hat. How nice is that.

I saw not as much of the Louis Malle marathon as I wanted but to note: How freakin wonderful is Zazie dans le Metro (that's 1) and 2) I watched a fair amount of God's Country, his look at life in Glencoe, Minnesota, in 1979 and again in 1985 and it almost did me in. All these small farm-farmers battling the vagaries of the Reagan administration which in retrospect seems so terribly thin edge of the wedge...this bit of American life that's vanished in my lifetime. I suppose I am an enormous sap, but it just about stopped my heart I was so overwhelmed with feeling. I knew a little of that Minnesota, just a very little.